I am only indicating and suggesting. Remembering the curiously similar history of New Testament criticism during the recent past, some of its stages running out their course within my own memory, I cannot but think, looking from the merely literary view-point, that the days are not far off when the now powerful theories of revolutionary criticism will seem improbable. And so I ask my younger Brethren at least to pause before going with the strong, deep stream.
THE DUKE OF ARGYLL QUOTED.
Let me quote a few sentences from the Duke of Argyll's paper:—
THE WORK OF THE SPADE.
"The assumption ... that precision in research is undermining the credit of the Hebrew Scriptures, is a presumption almost comically at variance with fact. There is, in particular, one 'weapon of precision' which has of late been working wonders in precisely the opposite direction. That weapon is the spade. And what has it been unearthing? Everywhere over that narrow strip of our planet on which its human interests have been most impressive and profound—everywhere from Tyre and Sidon, from Carmel and Lebanon, on the west, to Babylon and Nineveh and the boundary mountains of Assyria on the east—the spade has been disentombing continuous and triumphant proof of the genuine antiquity and historical character of the Jewish books.... Only the other day Mr Flinders Petrie has told us how the spade has uncovered those impregnable walls of the Amorite cities which were reported to invading Israel by the spies of Moses....
"I may be permitted to express a very strong opinion that in recent years Christian writers have been far too shy and timid in defending one of the oldest and strongest outworks of Christian theology. I mean the element of true prediction in Hebrew prophecy. It may be true that in a former generation too exclusive attention had been paid to it.... But the reaction has been excessive and irrational. A great mass of connected facts, and of continuous evidence, remains—which cannot be gainsaid. Even if the greater prophets can be brought down to the very latest date which the very latest fancies can assign to them, they depict and predict overthrows and vast revolutions in the East which did not take place for centuries" (pp. 28, 30).[6]
[6] "Professor Huxley speaks of the hopeless position of Christian divines 'raked by the fatal weapons of precision with which the enfants perdus of the advancing forces of science are armed.' ... Perhaps he means the small arms of the modern critical school. If he does, then precision is the very last characteristic which belongs to it. Its methods are largely subjective. Here and there it may have a clearly ascertained fact to rest upon. Here and there it may have arrived at some tolerably secure results. But in the main its methods are metaphysical, resting on nothing but individual preconceptions, applying tests and private canons of interpretation which are purely arbitrary" (Ibid., p. 28).
PREDICTION.
The analysis of prophetic consciousness may be, and in a great measure is, impossible. But the facts of prediction remain. It remains that our Lord Himself predicted. He foretold minutely His own death, and the end of the City and the Temple, and the circumstances of the close of this æon. Was He "soothsaying"? It remains that He perpetually and most emphatically claimed to be the exact Fulfilment of predictions which, on any hypothesis, were then ages old. Was He mistaken in their character and quality?